Sunday, March 26, 2006

Thanks to Hev's seemingly incurable wanderlust, I spent most of this week in Prague - for no reason, which is usually the best reason. As a first-timer, I was gratified to discover that Czech beer is indeed all that legend portends...

It is of course a place so photogenic it practically sucks the photos out of cameras, so check out the flickr link for the eye candy.

Almost a generation now since the "velvet revolution", the place still hides the occasional echo of communist austerity under the bubbling maelstrom of nascent, unfettered capitalism. It's a bittersweet, bewildering place, so many centuries old and yet still seeming somehow unfinished. I sense that it and I are not quite through.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Gawd, it was a bad weekend to be a British rugby fan. Scotland chained and whipped by the Irish, England dealt an unprecedented stuffing by the French... and our lot becoming the first team to fail to beat Italy at home. Draws in rugby are rare, so I suppose we got a collector's item. Lucky us.

These guys didn't mind, though. They came, they saw... well, two-and-a-half out of three ain't bad.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Jollity galore as Cardiff hosts the semi-finals of the Powergen Cup. Fans of London Wasps, Llanelli Scarlets, Leicester Tigers and Bath.. erm... Bath, descend upon us in swarms. Or packs. Or whatever the collective nouns for the other things are.

There are cheers and tears aplenty as Leicester and Bath are evicted from the house, but not without giving our little city a welcome splash of colour to remember them by.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Via the courtesy of the University Hospital of Wales, I today completed my personal set of Intimate Invasions by Trained ProfessionalsTM. I'm wondering whether I now qualify for a free binder... In the process, several new words for pain were discovered and a lifetime of trauma stored for future cashing-in on psychiatrists' couches.

On the plus side, I now know precisely where my threshold of I-will-kill-babies-to-make-this-stop is. Should I ever, therefore, be captured by a hostile power whilst in possession of your vital secrets, rest assured that they will be safe for at least 3.8 seconds.